Doug -
Suzanne and I just watched Paper Chase (1973) again and were treated to
the dry commentary of John Hausman as curmudgeonly professor
Kingsfield. Your comment reminded me of the equally dry delivery he
gave in a TV commercial several years later for an investment house?
where he uttered the line
"We make money the old-fashioned way, we EARN it!"
That noted, I would submit that the FRIAM list (and Friday kaffe
klatch) *IS* more about speculative discussion than it is about problem
solving. I find there is a delicate distinction between the
interesting exploration of ideas through group speculation and well...
what I think we all know of as a "circle jerk". I take this risk every
time I let myself get drawn into a thread.
- Steve
Has anybody just tried to design this application the
old-fashioned way; i.e., develop a set of requirements that
- define the interactions between the components of the system,
- identify (clearly, no vagueness allowed) the desired results
from running the simulation,
- identify (clearly, no vagueness allowed) the inputs for the
simulation, and
*then* determine what design best fits the application?
Just asking, 'cause this thread so far sniffs out suspiciously like
another "I want to talk about how *I* want to think about how (in the
purest theoretical sense) simulations should be
designed/implemented/thought of."
Just asking...
--Doug
As compared to endlessly seeing that special, elegant simulation
implementation system that is the ideal match to this particular
problem domain?
On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 6:26 PM, russell
standish <[email protected]>
wrote:
On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 12:46:26PM -0500, Roger
Critchlow wrote:
> I don't think you'll find this because it implies programming a
higher
> purpose and allowing the agents to jump the rails, as it were, and
start
> negotiating their way through the combinatorics of alternative
networks.
> Similarly, you won't find models in which agents invent new inputs
to
> monitor, new outputs to generate, and new rules which involve new
inputs and
> new outputs.
>
> Optimization within a fixed solution space, which is what we do
when we let
> agents play with the flow through a fixed network or let them
search out the
> most profitable rules in a set of prespecified alternatives, gets
hairy
> enough without opening things up to the infinity of potential
solutions that
> we didn't have time to program into the model ourselves.
>
EcoLab is an example of a model where the state space evolves over
time rather than staying fixed. It is not quite the ABM that Russ
Abbott is looking for, but does illustrate that it is possible. One
crucial feature is that there must be a separation of scales - the
dynamics of the system (optimisation, or whatever) must occur more
rapidly than the change to the state space. Otherwise, you get what is
known in the ALife world as a mutational meltdown - evolution ceases
to operate.
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Mathematics
UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [email protected]
Australia http://www.hpcoders.com.au
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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